Why Your 'Movable Type' Blog Must Die

by James A C Joyce

Mon Feb 2nd, 2004 at 05:17:00 PM EST

In the past, blogging was an interesting pastime. Now, with the advent of the ridiculously popular weblog package Movable Type, the Web is in risk of drowning under a tidal wave of morons who throttle search engines with writing that has no purpose and such PageRank-destroying features as "TrackBack".

You are all pretentious twats

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it

The word 'weblog' is acceptable. 'Blog' is just about tolerable. The following are simply galling:

* Blogosphere
* Travelblog
* Blogroll
* Moblog
* Blogstream

The puns just make them worse.

All of your blogs talk about the same crap

It's worthwhile to have one blog about a subject. It may be worthwhile to have twenty blogs about a subject. However, having 20,000 blogs about a small number of subjects is absolutely useless. See, the vast majority of all Movable Type blogs are written by those living in the United States. And the content of virtually any US citizen's Movable Type blog is about these subjects, in order of precedence:

* Presidential elections
* The economy
* Political parties
* Blogging
* Open source software

You read a couple of blogs, and you can get all of the "grassroots" information about North America's politics and economy that you need to know. All the rest are superfluous.

Remember, Salam Pax got popular because his blog was fresh and didn't just contain the same rubbish which your blog does.

Movable Type is badly designed

Movable Type is written by web designers, not programmers. It looks good, but unfortunately falls apart under the slightest touch. There are scripts out there which can automatically hammer your blog into tiny, tiny bits by someone with a room-temperature IQ and just a few keystrokes of effort. Movable Type's bad design makes it easier to DoS you

Every time you post a new item or someone posts a new comment, Movable Type spawns a little instance of perl. It then zips through and builds a new static page from the dynamic data since it's now changed. This process consumes your server's processor power. Movable Type's search feature in particular seems to be a processor hog for some reason.

In addition to this, most of you have email notification on new comments turned on. If (when) someone crapfloods you or decides to flood you with searches, you might be lucky enough to get 100, 300 or maybe even 10,000 emails in your inbox. If you're not so lucky, the server which runs your blog will crash and/or your hosting company will go apeshit. In this case, the load average of the hosting server reached 200. Two hundred. This was caused by a mere 350 searches per day over a two day period. No comment.

You are fucking stupid

The idiocy of Movable Type bloggers is most evident when they become emotional about a topic. When this occurs, they tend to make all kinds of massive, grating rhetorical faux pas such as false analogies. For instance, one fatuous journaller made the following claim after being crapflooded and having lots of search requests made on her blog:

Even the most asinine of hackers would not be in the least bit surprised to find themselves pressed with charges were they to enter a cement-and-mortar library and begin wantonly destroying books, ripping out their pages, defacing their covers, rendering them unusable by anyone else. Yet that is precisely what they are doing when they attack weblogs and sites containing original, creative content.

Congratulations, you dumb bint. You've just equated the useless babblings of millions of ostentatious retards around the world to a valuable free source of information available to all. Crapflooding is nothing like ripping up most of the books in a library. It's more likely scribbling on several thousands of pieces of paper and then stuffing them all into the "Comments and Suggestions" box hung up on the wall. This will hardly interfere at all with the experience of other library (blog) users. So shut the fuck up before you make a fool of yourself again by making nonsensical comparisons. You are all sheep

Whenever you discuss a subject about which you all fake your knowledge, such as "metablogging", the lot of you tend to throw out random and completely false opinions and then temperately argue each other down to a single, unified viewpoint. Which is completely wrong. Your blog is fucking up Google

This is what makes your blogs worse than useless. Previously, they were merely bundles of listless rambling scattered around the Web. Now their effects are positively toxic, choking search engines as they grow continuously and invasively.

If you try to search Google on any kind of nonmainstream topic which has been discussed amongst yourselves, it's entirely possible that all of the top search results are from a few well-connected bloggers who have blabbed about a subject and then been TrackBacked over and over again by hundreds of other people. TrackBack and "other related blog entries" are hypertextual viruses for fucking up Google, I swear. PageRank was not designed for this sort of linking where each in a series of a thousand pages links to all of the other 999 pages. In conclusion

Move your shit over to LiveJournal. At least then we can pretend that it doesn't exist and you can stop pretending that your shit doesn't stink.